After a few rounds of doing releases at live events, first at State of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/. 2025 and most recently with WordPress 7.1 at WordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US, it’s time to iterate and move towards a live-streamed zoom option. Doing in-person live releases has been a good experiment to bring WordPress’s big moments onto the big stage. Tying releases to events has also come with a range of constraints and downsides in terms of complex logistics, managing people power at events, and limits in how many members of a release squad can attend the event itself. Release squad feedback has echoed this—running a process that wasn’t designed to happen on stage adds real stress.
In talking to @matt about this, he shared an idea to try a livestreamed Zoom that the entire team can participate in, without the constraints of a fixed event date. The event would be done in a webinar format where release squad members and folks deeply involved in the release can share, while others can watch and ask questions. This should help ensure more of the release squad can participate, timezone permitting, without the financial burden of needing to attend an event. It also means the logistics will be far more based on what the release itself needs rather than being dictated by the live event itself.
This iteration is what will be done for the next few releases, starting with WordPress 7.2, set to be released in early December 2026. More details will be shared, including how to join, closer to the release date.
Thank you to everyone who helped make these in person releases happen and for giving feedback to help us iterate. If you have ideas about how to make the online version the best it can be, please share below.
Props @jorbin @jeffpaul @audrasjb for pre-publish review.
#release-process
